I wove this story while bobbing on the waves for hours and hours summer of 2024. I was inspired reading a lot of Anne of Green Gables short stories about old people, and how much charm and drama there can be in the backdrop and social scene of a little town. I also wanted to build a story around the pain of death and suicide, as there had been some hard things that year in my life. (…There were several other things that inspired it but I didn’t make note, so, I forget.)
Since I had it all planned out, writing went smoothly. Then it came time to submit it to the Writers of the Future contest and I gave it one last lookover…and realized IT’S NOT FANTASY. Gasp.
That is, the reader is unsure if it is fantasy or not. I as the writer know that it is definitely fantasy. Little demon shadows that run around attaching themselves to creatures and killing them and jumping to the one/thing that killed them? I mean duh.
…But in the story, it’s ambiguous if the death shadows are real. They might be a metaphor, or superstition. So…I went back in to the story and tried to give the shadows more, uh, substance, so the reader could tell they were real. Folk talking about ’em and stuff. But that still wasn’t enough as I also WANTED the ambiguity of how it all happens. So I decided the main character could have a magical power. I gave her the ability to see lifelines, or luck-lines, which can guide her to safer paths. Except they don’t always take her where she wants to go, so, she kind of ignores them too. Oh well. Honorable Mention! Yay!
In 2025 I needed a story to submit for a quarter and I said you know, I really, really like my Open Harvest story. It’s really good. Totally objectively. So I massaged it some more, tried to clean up some of the messy climax, and made the opening more engaging. (Or something like that.) And guess what? For 1st Quarter 2026, I GOT SEMI-FINALIST! I have the colored certificate to prove it. OOOOOO! More importantly, that means I also got a written critique from the judge. Which is awesome. She has some good points I’ll need to take back to the story (anachronisms, not knowing who the main character is until many paragraphs in…[although that part is also intentional so we’ll see….]), but she also pointed out the very thing I did above, that it’s…not quite fantasy.
So for this story, that’s as far as it goes in this contest. (For one I’m not allowed to submit it anymore, and for two, I don’t want to ruin what the story is by trying to make it high fantasy.)
But as mentioned I love the story, so, here’s the opening of it. Who knows…maybe it’ll win a different contest someday. Total: 15,000 words. Excerpt, part 1 of 3, 2000 words.
First Shadow
The old adage says bad luck comes in threes, and if you are feeling particularly morose, one death is sure to be followed by two more. People in my town are right superstitious and they’ll quote “threes” to you at every stubbed toe, never mind that if nothing else bad follows they forget all about it. John Larson attributed a bad apple crop one year and the death of his mother two years later as part of the same string of bad luck and he went to his grave looking out for the third. Maybe that was bad luck for his horse, who liked all three—apples, his mother, and John if you can believe it. I never did. Say anything about sets of threes, I mean—nor did I much like John Larson but that’s neither here nor there. I always say that life happens as it happens, and you can group parts of it together to tell a tragedy or a triumph.
This part begins with some odd sightings round the orchards and up and down the streets of town after dark.
There are ‘sightings’ of all sorts every year, usually in the gloom of winter, and despite my own ability to see my ‘fate lines’ I’ve learned skepticism when it comes to others. I’ve never met another who gets the shivers like I do, who sees the silvery-blue waves of fate reach out to a place or a person. When I was young I thought they were ‘luck lines’, until I learned the bitter lesson and would now prefer to ignore them. People still look at me sideways for my ‘uncanny luck’, little do they know.
Anyhow, here it was, summer, when folk have better things to be doing than telling spooky stories, and people were saying, with ardor—part brought on by the potency of the local whiskey, I have no doubt—that a death shadow was hanging about. How these fools could tell one shadow from another I don’t know but some old drunk said he saw one under a wagon, his landlady was claiming she spotted the red eyes as Tin Sullivan’s escaped horse trotted down the lane, young Jimmy Abrian swore a rabbit had it, and soon enough it was a sure thing that the town of Mac Dugal Ford was the host of an infestation of death shadows.
Death shadows are supposed to bring death, or portent it, or cause it, or draw it away depending on the tale and the teller. I don’t set anything by it and never have in all my 50 years. I couldn’t say that I hadn’t seen a shadow when Aed Macdara was shot in the orchards twenty years ago, but neither could I say for sure that I had. There are shadows enough in this world and death enough too.
The sightings this summer would’ve all been forgotten soon enough if the old lady hadn’t died, that being the start of the bad luck, number one of three.
Old Lady Mac Dugal wasn’t much older than myself. We’d drunk a bit of sherrie together for her 62nd birthday only a few weeks before, and no matter how long the devil’s drink sits in your liver, it wasn’t the cause of her falling down the stairs. Her son told everyone aloud that she had a dizzy spell and that’s what did it—she’d been known to suffer those spells—then he all but told everyone quietly that she’d finished off a bottle of aged sherrie. Curse him for many things including besmirching his mother’s good name. The people of this town always liked the Baroness Mac Dugal—she didn’t give them trouble and tended to invite people in for tea—whereas they’re none too fond of her son. So-called Baron Mac Dugal, these twenty years since his father died, although the title was never officially granted. The king doesn’t pay much attention to the gentry or common folk in this area, so long as the ferry runs at the ford, and word had it he simply forgot about the boy Mac Dugal. Doesn’t matter. Around here, the Old Lady Mac Dugal was Baroness and it was up to her to name her heir, and she chose to be Baroness until she died.
Sherrie, eh?
I don’t think so. That brew was only for special occasions. Whiskey might’ve done it, had she kept any around, which she didn’t. I never knew Moira Mac Dugal for a drunk and I’ll not believe it til my own dying day. Her son may be a rascal but I don’t blame him either. I’ve seen those dizzy spells come upon her; her eyes get a faraway look, her legs start trembling, and usually she can find her way to a chair to collapse on until she regains herself. Once we were walking the estate gardens—there are no roses of equal in paradise—and she fell right down on the path.
Poor Moira. She was a pompous old woman and I suffered through many hours of blather but I’ll miss her some. When my fate lines connected me to her for the first time, I went the opposite direction, but the lines aren’t always wrong or bad and eventually we were drawn together anyway. I used to go to tea every Sunday, and sometimes during the week too. She would prattle on about her son or her cats, or the latest news, I’d listen and make the occasional remark. Her tea was always too strong, since she let it sit while she talked and wouldn’t serve it until she finished her thread of thought. But those little cakes—anything was worth it for those cakes. I’d eat two before the tea was served, and another two after. Sometimes I could take a piece home and save it for the next day. In fact it was only a few months before she died, a cold spring afternoon, when she asked me the most peculiar question.
“If I could give you anything,” she said, as plainly as if she were talking about driving me home in her carriage, “what would you like?”
“Pardon?” the word slipped out before I could digest what she said. Rather, I couldn’t digest it because it was so ridiculous. We’d been meeting for tea for nigh twenty years, and aside from exchanging jams at Wintertide and the occasional knit shawl she requested and paid me fairly for—why, I don’t suppose she’d ever given me anything. It wouldn’t do. People would talk. Why is the Baroness favoring that grumpy old maid? they’d grumble—and sure that’s how they call me—and they’d begin to expect handouts themselves. That’s how it is with gentry. Don’t mix with the common folk like me.
Moira waved her hand impatiently, the lace of her cuff flapping against her wrist. “You heard me right, Brigit. Of all my possessions, or anything in my means.”
I took the inquiry seriously, although the what for escaped me. I’ve need for little and asked for none in my years alone. My parents had both passed a decade before, and I lived comfortably by the money they’d saved for my dowry. True, I sold some furniture and a bit of silver in order to buy a second goat—what need have I of extra trimmings in that house of one person? I could always have taken in lodgers but the thought sat poorly with me. I preferred my chickens and my bees and my goats. Why, sometimes I even let Floyd in the house with me, as long as he minds himself and doesn’t chew the tablecloth.
Floyd was my first baby goat, and I’d every intention of selling him—that’s why I got a second goat, besides the cheese—but he took to following me around and I selfishly decided I should keep the first baby. After him, I did sell them. I named them Ane, Do, Tre, and made sure not to get attached, and if I wouldn’t cook a goat myself, well, I’ll eat it at someone else’s table and carefully not ask whence it came.
I collect my honey and my milk and my eggs, I eat a chicken every Sunday dinner, Floyd and I gather berries and wild roots in the hills, and during the Open Harvest I collect more than my share and preserve it all for the year. I trade what extra I have for the little things I need, including wool for my knitting. I darn my own socks and take good care of my dresses and my boots.
There was one thing I wanted in all the world, and I didn’t think Moira Mac Dugal would like to let me have it.
I took a bite of the cake and savored the rich lemon spice on my tongue, as I regarded my friend’s open expression. She slumped sideways in her big chair, against the arm rest, her right hand under her chin and her left tracing the whorls of the upholstery. Her right foot peeked out of her worn but expensive skirts, and the bouncing of her toes was the only indication that she waited for anything.
Moira always dressed well for our teas, partly to show off her wealth and partly because she had precious little to dress up for anymore. That day she wore a diamond cross on a silver chain, with bright diamond flowers on her ears. Her brooch was inlaid pearl, in the shape of a mermaid. It made me recall other adornments that I’d seen.
If I could give you anything….
“I have always admired your pearl earrings,” I said slowly. I had no real jewelry of my own. What would I wear it for? Pearl earrings were just the sort of extravagance I could laugh at. Not that I expected her to give them to me, but I answered her question honestly.
A slow smile grew on her face. “The big pearls? Like I’m wearing the ocean on my head? I love those pearls, Brigit, and you won’t get them til I’m in my grave!”
“It’s a promise then,” I said.
We laughed together, in good nature. I think Moira was the only person to see me laugh.
“Pick something else,” Moira said, her voice warm. She pulled her hand from under her chin and served herself another cup of bitter tea.
I licked the lemon from my fingers on my right hand, and peered down at my lap. My left hand had been employed for many minutes stroking one of her long-haired chocolate cats. Rowan and Ruin, she called her precious children. Rowan always greeted me when I arrived and she was generally good natured. Ruin was a boy, and thus a trouble, often knocking things off of shelves, but he’s the one who silently jumped up on my lap and slept there while I enjoyed my cake and suffered the tea. I thought for a moment that a fate line connected me to that cat, and while that puzzled me, I decided to pretend I hadn’t noticed.
“I like your cats,” I said, feeling my own face smile as it seldom does, “but I suspect the same rule applies.”
Moira narrowed her eyes thoughtfully at that, and sipped from her cup.
“In all the world, I can think of nothing that would please me than more of this cake,” I said finally.
“Then you should have two cakes to take with you today,” she declared. I thought she meant two slices and that would have been well enough, but the old bat called in her cook and ordered two full cakes for me, in my preferred flavors of strawberry and lemon. The cakes were wrapped in scraps of fine linen, and I hurried them home and set beeswax over them to keep them fresh. I then hid one in the kitchen, in a salad bowl, and the other in the drawing room with my sewing. It was silly, I know, but I thought that if a robber should enter my home and take anything, by God it should not be those cakes.
[end excerpt]
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